"The price of food and drink may have fallen faster than official estimates, according to the government body charged with collecting the data.

The Office for National Statistics said the official consumer prices index (CPI) figure for food shows that prices have fallen by 3.3% since June 2014, while alcoholic drinks have dropped by 3%.

But a project set up by the ONS to “scrape” price data from the websites of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose found that between June 2014 and February 2016 food fell in price by 4.5%, while drinks were down 6.8% over the same period.

The gaps between the official and supermarket data are in some cases alarmingly wide, and may call into question the validity of the CPI numbers issued each month.

For example, the CPI data shows that the price of breakfast cereals has gone up by 2.4%, while the data from the supermarkets reveals that prices have fallen by 32.2%. Tomatoes, according to the CPI index, have gone up in price by 4.1% since June 2014, but the supermarket price is down 23.5%."

The economic issues here are a bit "inside baseball" but the broader issue is that the first world is in a serious deflationary period, with prices falling more than reported. The constant hue and cry that the middle class is falling behind fails once one realized that the slow income rise allows the earner to purchase more because prices have been falling not keeping up with inflation.

What makes this incomprehensible, is that the people protesting about this are on the left, the same people who have been in control of the economy for the past 8 years. It is almost as if they are anti Democrat.

Prices in America decline over time expect in areas which government creates protections to price declines, like housing which is protected through zoning, and growth/services boundaries, and medicine, which is 60% paid for by government entities, and government (schools are an example).

Our spending on entertainment rose, but that is because we are consuming far more entertainment.